Network-based marketplaces have become increasingly popular venues for the buying and selling of goods and services as communication speeds and processing power have enabled the adoption of the Internet in everyday society. As such, traditional high-volume sellers (e.g., large department stores, wholesalers, warehouse clubs, manufacturers, etc.) have become empowered with a medium on which to sell their goods and services. These high-volume sellers find it difficult to integrate existing infrastructure and sales support mechanisms (e.g., ERP systems, advanced planning systems, sales order management systems, etc.) into the network-based marketplace environment because of a lack of scalable solutions to administer their need to sell products in high volume. Network-based marketplaces have traditionally focused on small consumers who only occasionally list items for sale. High-volume sellers, while still wanting to leverage the visibility of large network-based trading marketplaces, find that network-based marketplaces do not adequately support the administration and management of their transactions because of insufficient integration with their existing business processes.
Technology to aid high-volume sellers with their transaction processes has largely been limited to manual offline management systems (e.g., spreadsheets, databases, etc.), and disparate product listing management systems (e.g., listing of one product at a time, or a service for listing products that is independent from the network-based trading marketplace). Manual offline management systems may require that sellers input data twice, and constantly devote time and resources to updating databases and spreadsheets offline from individual network-based trading systems.
Similarly, disparate product listing management systems are inefficient because they do not allow scalability of business processes and do not integrate well with the infrastructure of most high-volume sellers. As a result, high-volume sellers are not able to effectively leverage network-based trading systems because they are often unable to keep up with the demand on their limited time to manage listings (e.g., investment required exceeds budget), and service levels within a network-based trading system suffer (products do not get shipped, fraudulent buyers are disguised, etc.).
In order to make a network-based trading environment more meaningful for high-volume sellers, there is some incentive for operators to provide systems for rapidly deploying listings to buyers in a network-based trading marketplace. However, the design of such integrated systems present a number of technical challenges, specifically regarding how databases are organized and how hardware architecture is designed and/or implemented to manage such listings. Further, a number of technical challenges exist with respect to the automation of large numbers of listings that are received at once because scheduling, delivering, and posting must be integrated with a plurality of internal and external databases that must be synchronized in order to list products effectively.